SHE HAD AGED somewhat since he had last seen her, or looked somewhat older than the person he had been carrying around in his head for the past three years, but she was forty-one now, almost forty-two, which was only two years younger than his mother, his still beautiful mother who had aged somewhat in the past three years as well, and undoubtedly Vivian Schreiber was still beautiful herself, just a little older, that was all, and even if she was objectively less beautiful than his mother, she still had that glow about her, that seductive glamour-glow of power and certainty that his mother didn’t have, his hard-working artist mother who only bothered about looking her best when she went out into the world, whereas Vivian Schreiber wrote books about artists and was always out in the world, a well-heeled widow with no offspring and a multitude of friends, according to Gil, someone who hobbed and nobbed with artists, writers, journalists, publishers, gallery owners, and museum directors, while Ferguson’s more subdued mother was hunkered down inside her work with no intimate others beyond her husband and her son.
Sitting in the backseat of the taxi on their way into town from the airport, Vivian (not Mrs. or Madame Schreiber, as she had instructed him in the terminal, but Vivian or Viv) asked Ferguson a hundred questions about himself and his plans and what he was hoping to accomplish by living in Paris, which he answered by talking about the book he had started writing back in the summer, about his determination to improve his French to such a degree that he would be able to speak it as well as he spoke English, about his eagerness to plunge into Gil’s reading list and soak up every word of those one hundred books, about seeing as many films as he could and recording his observations in his three-ring loose-leaf binder, about his ambition to write articles on films and publish them in British or American or French-based English-language magazines if any editor would accept them, about wanting to play basketball somewhere and joining a league if there were such things as amateur basketball leagues in Paris, about the possibility of tutoring French kids in English to pad the allowance his parents would be sending him every month, an under-the-table cash arrangement since by law he wouldn’t be allowed to work in France, and on and on the jet-lagged Ferguson talked in response to Vivian Schreiber’s questions, no longer intimidated by her as his fifteen-year-old self had been, able to think boldly enough now to look upon her not as an auxiliary parent but as an adult acquaintance and possible friend, for there was no reason to suppose she had offered him a room in her building out of some dormant maternal impulse (childless woman seeks to take care of the child she might have had in her early twenties), no, proxy mothering was not at issue here, there was another reason, an as yet unknowable reason that continued to perplex him, and therefore, once he had answered her many questions, he had only one question to ask her, which was the same question he had been asking himself ever since Gil had received her letter: Why was she doing this? Not that he wasn’t grateful, Ferguson said, not that he wasn’t thrilled to be back in Paris, but they hardly knew each other, and why would she put herself out like this for someone she hardly knew?
A good question, she said. I wish I could answer it.
You don’t know?
Not really.
Does it have something to do with Gil? To thank him for what he did for you during the war, maybe?
Maybe. But it’s not just that. More about being at loose ends, I think. It took me fifteen years to write the Chardin book, and now that it’s done, the thing in my life that used to be the book has turned into an empty space.
Fifteen years. I can’t believe fifteen years.
Vivian smiled, a frowning sort of smile, Ferguson remarked, but nevertheless a smile. She said: I’m slow, honey.
I still don’t get it. What does the empty space have to do with me?
It could be the photograph.
What photograph?
The picture your mother took of you when you were a little boy. I bought it, remember? And for the past three years it’s been hanging on a wall in the room where I finished writing Chardin. I’ve looked at that photo thousands of times. The little boy with his back to the camera, his bony spine protruding as the striped T-shirt presses against the vertebrae, his thin right arm extended, his hand splayed out on the carpet, and Laurel and Hardy on the screen in the distance, which is the same distance from the front of you as the camera is from the back of you. The proportions are just perfect — sublime. And there you are, all alone on the floor, stranded in the middle of those two distances. Boyhood incarnate. The loneliness of boyhood. The loneliness of your boyhood. And needless to say, whenever I look at the photograph, I think about you, the boy I met in Paris three years ago, the same boy who had once been the little boy in the picture, and after thinking about you so often, it’s hard for me not to think of us as friends. So when Gil wrote to me and said you wanted to come here, I said to myself, Good, now we can become real friends. I know it sounds a bit daft, but there it is. I think we’re going to have an interesting time together, Archie.
THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT was vast, the sixth-floor chambre de bonne was not. Seven large rooms below, one little room above, and each of those seven rooms was filled with furniture, standing lamps, Persian rugs, paintings, drawings, photographs, and books, books everywhere in the master bedroom and the study and along one wall of the living room, a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment with a simple, uncluttered feel to it because the rooms were ample enough to absorb the objects they contained without impinging on one’s movements, a pleasant feeling of just enough and never too little or too much, and how taken Ferguson was by the huge, all-white, old-fashioned kitchen with the black and white tiles underfoot, and the mirrored double doors that stood between the living room and the dining room, with their slim French door handles as opposed to the stumpy doorknobs used in America, and the massive double windows in the living room, sheathed in thin, almost translucent muslin drapes, which allowed the light to filter through at all hours of the morning and afternoon and often to the point of dusk. Bourgeois heaven in the apartment below, but upstairs in the sixth-floor maid’s room, which was technically on the seventh floor of the building, since the French counted the ground floor not as the first floor but the rez-de-chaussée, there was nothing but four bare walls, a sloped ceiling, and just enough space for a bed, a narrow five-shelf bookcase, a tiny desk with a creaking wood-and-wicker chair, a built-in storage drawer under the bed, and a cold-water sink. Communal toilet down the hall; no shower or bath. A floor that was reached by taking the elevator to the fifth floor and walking up the stairs to the floor above, where a long wooden corridor stretched along the northern face of the building, with six identical brown doors standing side by side in a row, each one the property of the owners of the apartments on floors zero through five, Ferguson’s door being the second of those doors, while the rooms behind the other doors were occupied by the Spanish and Portuguese maids who worked for the apartment owners below. It was a grim little monk’s cell, Ferguson realized, when he set foot in it with Vivian on the morning of his first day in Paris, not at all what he had been expecting, the smallest space he would ever have to live in since the beginning of his life, a chambre that would no doubt take some getting used to before he could learn to inhabit it without feeling he was about to suffocate, but it did have windows, or one window in two parts, a tall double window in the northern wall, with a Lilliputian balcony surrounded by a metal railing on three sides and just enough room to accommodate his size eleven-and-a-half feet, and from that balcony or through that double window he could look north and take in a prospect of the Quai d’Orsay, the Seine, the Grand Palais on the other side of the river, and up through the right bank all the way to the far-off ivory dome of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre, and if he turned his head to the left and leaned over the balcony railing, there was the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. Not bad. Not bad at all, finally, because there had never been any question that he would have to spend all his time in that room, it was to serve as his place for writing, studying, and sleeping, but the place for eating, bathing, and talking was downstairs in Vivian’s apartment, where the cook Celestine gave him food whenever he asked for it, the delicious bowls of coffee and tartines beurrées for breakfast in the morning, the hot lunches when he wasn’t eating sandwiches in little cafés on or around the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and the dinners with or without Vivian at home or the dinners with Vivian in restaurants or with Vivian and other people in restaurants or at dinner parties in Vivian’s apartment or the apartments of other people, and as Vivian slowly introduced him to the complex Parisian world she belonged to, Ferguson slowly began to settle in.